Tales of two cities : a Persian memoir /

Milani, an expatriate Iranian professor, has written an interesting memoir. The son of a prosperous family, Milani was sent overseas to be educated. He lived in Oakland, California, in the 1960s, where he listened to political sermons by Bobby Seale, participated in anti-Shah demonstrations, and studied Maoism. Returning to Iran in the 1970s, he taught at the National University until his anti-Shah activities led to his imprisonment. While in prison, he discovered that prisoners segregated themselves by ideology, the imprisoned religious opponents of the regime wanting no interaction with the imprisoned secular opponents-an ominous taste of what would come after the Islamic revolution. Freed before the revolution, Milani returned to teaching until the pressures exerted on freedom of thought by the Shi'ite clerics' regime became intolerable, and Milani fled Iran. A great deal of information about Iran is contained in this volume, from the Shi'ite clerics' obsession with hierarchy to Iranians' favorite conspiracy theories explaining the forces behind Iran's Islamic revolution. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Robert J. Andrews, Duluth P.L., Minn. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An exceptional, emotionally blooded memoir of a young man's life in modern Iran--viewed from the perspective of his self- chosen exile. Milani (Social Sciences/Notre Dame College, Calif.), born to a well-off family in Tehran in 1948, was sent to the US at age 15 to be educated. He returned to a teaching job in 1975 only to be imprisoned under the shah's regime two years later. Milani departed for good in 1986, having suffered a broken marriage and physical symptoms of stress and depression that had everything to do with the country's climate of political ugliness. Any book chronicling those experiences would be interesting; that this one turns out to be a breathtaking example of the quiet, selfless gorgeousness of the memoirist's art is the reader's sheer good fortune. Milani offers classically ordered writing about character, place, and time. Contemporary Tehran is described as ``an overcrowded, densely polluted, dangerously stratified, economically hyped, architecturally schizoid, dust-ridden modern metropolis.'' The author's youth was ``contaminated with religion.'' Best are the descriptions of childhood--the psychologically complex parents behind the beards and veils; blackly comic musings about shortages of Ramadan pastries; circumcision at age 15 (``It's nothing,'' his friends tell him. ``They just cut off half your dool''). But the entire memoir is infused with the perversity, nightmarishness, and occasional strange sweetness of growing up amid religious rule and ritual. The book has a few flaws. Long excurses on Iranian politics veer off into abstractness, and the author seems unable to outgrow a certain coyness when writing about women (for whom, it must be said, he has an admirable regard). But this is a tale on whose every word readers will hang. Is exile--with its nuances of time, space, grief, loss, and the human comedy--the most reliable progenitor of literary beauty? This book would support that theory. (b&w photos, not seen)